Ginny Gall (32 page)

Delvin walked the streets. He felt like a sailor home from a long voyage. He still had the feeling that he was being followed. Don’t be crazy, he said to himself, but he couldn’t completely shake it. At the picture show the couples seemed huddled together in fright. Pedestrians looked lost. Just past the lights of a store he stopped to look back for his trailer, his devotee. There was no one. He was touched by how shabby the buildings were—the Empire office building with its entablatures and foamy cornices, the Western States building with its red brick front and tiny windows that caught the west-tending, falsely glamorous sunlight. The courthouse looked like something left over from the worst of Roman times, a building no one thought enough of even to tear down. Goldman’s offered anoraks and Maine jackets and low-priced formal wear. Dark stains on the mock Greek front of the Mountaineer Bank. The Peacock Hotel with its jowly stone face and its gazebos set like little guardhouses on the corners at the top of its six stories seemed to brood. He noted familiar trees. Cracked buckeyes and thick-waisted poplars and hickories that looked bitter and worn by life. He had always loved
city bushes and patches of urban grass and flowers in window boxes and as he walked he recalled these, mostly gone now except for a big patch of red-throated nandina bushes over on Story street planted by the wife of the owner of Holston Hardware to decorate a blank gray brick wall, and pittisporum at Mott’s, Mrs. Combine’s mock banana bushes. He looked in on still-vacant lots spotted with pokeweed and goat sorrel and stopped to gather seeds from bolted morning glories in a fence on Governor Piddle street, where the Munger house, a large building with peeling french doors and concrete vases stuffed with ragged azaleas, had been torn down to put up a center for state culture. He noted broken walls and bellied chicken wire fences, alleys where old men propped themselves against stacked crates, splashing their water on the unwashed bricks. People were living out in the open now, in tents and board shacks and residing in crannies behind buildings and tucked into holes in embankments and under the bridge down on Custer where the street dipped low and made a pond on the rainiest days and down by the river where the muddy water foamed against the pilings of the Converse Bridge. Along a yellow wall with the words C
HESTER
A
PPLIANCES
written in black letters on it, white men lined up. What were they waiting for? Tractor wheels propped in a row against a wall behind Puckett Machine Shop. Broken metal parts and black, oily ground and a big tub used to cool off the hotwork. He breathed in the rich, heavy, fluid stink of burning metal and thought he too was becoming a man like the other men walking the streets, peering into alleys and vacant lots. In the yard of Manger Auto Repair skeletal cars rested, waiting for armorers to refit them. He preferred—no, not preferred, felt a wobbly, living nostalgia for—the old wagons, returning to the city in force now, horses and mules pulling milk carts and Murphy and Studebaker wagons and buckboards piled with farm produce and, layered under gunny sacks and crushed ice, seafood hauled up by night train from the Gulf. At the ice plant big cloudy blocks coughed out of the chute and were grabbed by shirtless men with tongs and swung onto the back of Carson wagons and stacked in trucks that had I
SSOM
I
CE
C
OMPANY
written in gold on their green sides. Here
too men hung around, sucking ice slivers, waiting for something to happen. Pointless lines of men, men in bunches and listless groups, solitary men picking shreds of tobacco from their teeth, idlers, worriers, cashed-out men, strong men grown weak and sluggish, skeezing into bars and restaurant doorways. He marked the tremor of a bottom lip, the troubled brow, the picked-at sore on the face of a man reading a newspaper folded to a dozen lines of type; noted the africano lady who looked familiar—but he wasn’t quite able to place—with a cast in her left eye that gave her a cockeyed aspect that didn’t interfere with the small eager smile she directed toward the Embers Supper Club on Mareton Avenue; traced the harried looks, the looks of displacement and earnest willingness to do anything that might engender money or kindness or love or simply a few moments without being shamed or hit; caught the brokenhearted, the outright weepers, with or without handkerchiefs; scoped the cornered, the effusively lying, the desperate making wild claims. He marked the practiced liars, the hard-pressed guilty, the twitching and fluttery humiliated, the dazed, the obnoxious attempting to pass themselves off as simply loud, the ones with stone faces that hid nothing really, checked the self-mocking and envious. He studied the faces swollen by beatings or tears or genetic malformations, birthmarks and such; angled the ones battered into cripples, or the natural cripples, the deaf and dumb, the palsied, the blind, including the blind seller of peanuts, Willie Perkins, still sitting in his little cupped tractor seat by his stand over on Montgomery street; and Ethel Beck, great beauty of the east side, blinded at age eight by an overdose of wood alcohol supplied by her father, still tapping along—more rapping than tapping—with her bamboo cane painted white. He observed the pinched places in people’s cheeks, their noses pointed up sniffing for a change in the weather; considered women barely able to hold back screams, women raging at the mouths of alleys, old ladies pressing their backs against brick walls, mothers crying, laughing, scolding children, harlots with melted ice cream dripping from a paper cup onto stone steps, women without stockings, women with—and men: men resting, waiting, men telling uneasy stories, men shouting into
barrels, picking up pennies from the street, men hitting horses, men shaving in alleys, spitting into their hands . . . men waiting for what wasn’t coming . . . or what was . . .

He rested his back against a scarred tulip poplar in Constitution Park, watching an old white man peel an apple with a gold penknife for a little girl in a yellow crepe dress. He watched an unidentified africano man with one leg pull himself into the bed of a wagon, work himself onto the seat, untie the reins from the brake, and clop a brown mule down the cobblestone street, the man smiling sarcastically to himself, the mule never picking up its gait as the wagon rounded the corner and disappeared—into time itself, it seemed to Delvin—leaving behind a patch of undisturbed sunlight on the fish-colored cobbles of Tremaine street.

He bought a paper cup of sweet iced tea at the window marked “Colored” at the back of Hunter’s Restaurant, these windows and doors and slots and chutes the only places, he thought, where the word
colored
was ever capitalized, smiling to himself as he thought this, tipping his head to the negro woman who handed the cup to him, wanting to touch her hand with his, just for the humanness, the solid pressure of life between them, let her know he was as alive as she was, ready for what came next . . .

He sat drinking the tea on a low wall overlooking the alley in back of a vacant lot between Cooper’s Mercantile and the newspaper offices. Rain had left a tracery of red clay veins running among broom and dog fennel in the lot. Out in the alley a yellow mongrel shook a dirty white glove in its jaws. A crow pecked at a ragged bouquet of chrysanthemums and at the entrance to the alley two women scolded three tiny children who gazed up at them with the rapt faces of believers. A breeze picked at the tops of a patch of fennel, touching the pale green filigree with a mindless tenderness, and brought his lost, or never quite found, love, Celia, to mind. Or maybe, he thought, she just came on her own. Or never left. She’d sent letters to the funeral home, letters he dived into as soon as he got the hugs
and handshakes out of the way. He’d tied them up with a string and carried them with him everywhere in the inside pocket of the brown linen coat he wore. He took them out to re-sort them, commonplace with him these days. He opened the first and read it again. Somehow it seemed to have changed. It was not so interested in him as he thought. It was kindly, but distant. He read another and then another. The letters were like messages to a straggler. To the one who couldn’t keep up. How strange the world was—how so easily you could get yourself into a fix. He had a tendency to hang back in corners, wore the brim of his hat pulled down and stood in the shade of great oaks—still not sure the law wasn’t waiting for him. He had begun to dream again about his mother. In the dreams he met her on woodland paths and in mountain fields, the two of them hurrying past each other on unnamed errands. He was already gone by and into the woods or the next field when he realized that had been Cappie just lifting her hand to acknowledge him. When he ran back to find her, she was gone. He felt the mystery of things all around him. He wasn’t even sad, he was only awestruck. He remembered how the professor had said that in olden times you could be changed into a bird, a tree, a crawling troll . . . you could become a star or a set of stars, and the stars could speak, and the rocks and the wind could tell you who you were and what was about to happen, the gods or God himself talk to you directly, and an invisible force could be applied—but none of that kind of speech occurs anymore, only an occasional pale, barely coherent whisper remains in the world, the flicker of a conscience, or the sick tug of love that claims to be real. And this had saddened him and he had spoken to rocks and trees himself but nothing talked back. But the professor was wrong about love. It was more than just a whispering thing. It was strong and it held you up. A happiness had overtaken him—his mother was somewhere out there—he knew it. He would wake with tears in his eyes, only a few, and an easefulness in his heart.

He placed the packet of letters beside him on the wall. A small stack, creased and worn already. He leaned down and kissed them and then he got up and walked away.

“I believe I will be shoving off in the morning,” he told Mr. Oliver.

In the old man’s face was a mix of sadness and relief. The relief outweighed the sadness. It hurt Delvin to see it.

Mr. Oliver put his heavy, knobby hand on his. He was wearing a new ring, a chunky gold ring with a crest on it. Delvin started to ask about it, but just then Mrs. Parker brought dessert into the dining room and Mr. Oliver cried out that Delvin was leaving them again and they both began to weep. Casey sat pulled up tight to the table, looking at Delvin as if he wasn’t sure who he was and wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He too was wearing a crusty gold ring. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, Delvin thought. I don’t even know who I am.

He repeated these two sentences to the Ghost later as they sat at the card table the Ghost had set up in the old tack room. He now used the room for a combo bedroom, office, dining room and kitchen.

“Probably all the usual,” the Ghost said. Just the day before he’d got rid of his beard and shaved his hair close; it looked like a bit of orange mist had settled on the top of his pale head.

“You as saucy as ever, aint you?”

“Worse.” The albino half rose from his chair. “Let me show you this.” He pulled a new Placer clasp knife from his pocket and laid it on the table. It looked like a sleek silver fish. When Delvin went to pick it up the Ghost skidded it out of reach, pushed it off the table into his other hand and held it up trophy style.

“You gon show it to me?” Delvin said.

“Your hands dry?”

“Let me see it.”

The Ghost gave him the knife.

“It’s right righteous,” Delvin said, though he had no interest in knives and didn’t open it. Still it had a lovely heft and felt compact and complete. He turned it in his hand. He would like to give Celia something that had this detailed perfection. He handed the
knife back. In his pocket he carried an old tape-wrapped Barlow. “I mean,” he said, “I don’t know what I’m going to be doing next. In the next minute.”

“Me, I know my way on down the road. That’s the way I like it too.”

“I don’t know which of us is the lucky one.”

“Maybe neither,” the Ghost said, “not in this world.”

Delvin wondered if the Ghost wasn’t more intelligent than he’d thought.

“You want to go traveling with me?”

“Not for a thousand dollars.”

Delvin was troubled that he didn’t want to go alone. He wondered where the man Frank was by now. Maybe he should go over to the Emporium, get somebody over there to go with him. But he didn’t care to see any of that world again just now. He went back into the house and out onto the porch where by light of a kerosene lamp and sitting beside Mr. Oliver in one of the big pontific arm chairs he read a book the professor had given him,
Who Is the Negro Man
, by Dr. Quinton Merckson of the University of Pennsylvania. Merckson argued that the negro man was the bearer of the world’s troubles. This was because he had the strength to carry the weight. Delvin had read this sort of thing before, heard it before. He had a tendency to believe what he read, just because what he read was down in print. Later he would sort through it and find out what fit. For tonight he was the able negro man, hauler of the world’s burdens. A soul thing, the doctor said in so many words. The negro man had a deeper and more refined, a nobler soul. He’d heard this from preachers at funeral services. For the trampled-on it always came down to something like that.

He put the book down on a little wicker table and looked over at Mr. Oliver, who was listening to the
Adelaide
concerto, his favorite Mozart, on the wind-up Victrola, turned down low.

“You think the negro man is designed to carry the world’s burden?” Delvin said.

“If we are I spect we need to bulk up,” Mr. Oliver said, look
ing down his ample front. He flipped open a wing of his black vest, revealing the red silk underlining. Casey lay on the floor putting another jigsaw puzzle together. Assembled, so Delvin recalled, the puzzle would become a picture of lions resting under a tree in Africa. The tree had a squashed gray top that always seemed to Delvin a mistake until he saw a photo of such a tree in the professor’s museum. Acacia. They grew in Africa where everybody in this house was from.
Everybody
came from Africa, the professor had told him. White man caught the first train out, he said.